This was the first McKillip I actually enjoyed. I actively hated The Winter Rose, and I was into the third book of the Riddlemaster trilogy before I abandoned it due to nothing-happening-itis. This one worked for me, despite the fact that I read the first page four time before I figured out there was a kid in the fireplace, because ... hm. I think it was kind of like half-closing your eyes and stepping back from a really complicated painting and just getting the tone and general ideas, whereas before I was lost in the details. (Which is pretty much exactly like your classical music analogy above, now that I read upwards.)
Her books work best when there's something real under all that icing (Shadow in Ombria is a pretty book with zero heart), and SotB works on that level, I think. She has to work hard to balance that load of very heavy, opaque description and metaphor, and when she slips it's almost unreadable -- Riddlemaster is three books of unparalleled worldbuilding and characters, but the plot was so thin, and wandered so much, I got bored and gave up.
The funny thing is that my critique of McKillip is characterstic of my tendency to get especially irritated with authors who have my own flaws. I'm always a hairsbreadth away from wandering into complete opacity and disconnection with the real world, via pretty language, and since I've worked so hard over the years to overcome that, it's a huge thorn for me when reading McKillip.
The fact that all of her climaxes occur in some "magical" realm of feeling and thought, with people not doing anything so much as, I don't know, magicking and feeling their way out of things, grates on me after a while. It's lovely at first, but then you want to know what mystical power is responsible for making things happen, why laying the silver acorn on the golden plate in the heart of the wood ends the sleeping spell or whatever, and you just never get it. She means to be fantastical and fairytale, but sometimes it comes off as lazy.
Anyhow. This book spun such a pretty tale, and I liked the setting. The Book of Atrix Wolf is clearly French, Ombria strikes me as Italian, Winter Rose is English, and I loved the baroque German feel of Basilisk.
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momijizukamori and
catching up on your booklogging today
Date: 2006-09-15 06:43 pm (UTC)Her books work best when there's something real under all that icing (Shadow in Ombria is a pretty book with zero heart), and SotB works on that level, I think. She has to work hard to balance that load of very heavy, opaque description and metaphor, and when she slips it's almost unreadable -- Riddlemaster is three books of unparalleled worldbuilding and characters, but the plot was so thin, and wandered so much, I got bored and gave up.
The funny thing is that my critique of McKillip is characterstic of my tendency to get especially irritated with authors who have my own flaws. I'm always a hairsbreadth away from wandering into complete opacity and disconnection with the real world, via pretty language, and since I've worked so hard over the years to overcome that, it's a huge thorn for me when reading McKillip.
The fact that all of her climaxes occur in some "magical" realm of feeling and thought, with people not doing anything so much as, I don't know, magicking and feeling their way out of things, grates on me after a while. It's lovely at first, but then you want to know what mystical power is responsible for making things happen, why laying the silver acorn on the golden plate in the heart of the wood ends the sleeping spell or whatever, and you just never get it. She means to be fantastical and fairytale, but sometimes it comes off as lazy.
Anyhow. This book spun such a pretty tale, and I liked the setting. The Book of Atrix Wolf is clearly French, Ombria strikes me as Italian, Winter Rose is English, and I loved the baroque German feel of Basilisk.